Reparto Generale Sicurezza

The Reparto Generale Sicurezza (General Security Department, RGS) is the department of the Italian Air Staff (Stato Maggiore dell'Aeronautica) that collects, verifies and monitors Italian reports of unidentified flying objects (OVNI), the task that the Italian state assigned to the Air Force after the wave of sightings of 1978. Citizens report a sighting on an official form that they hand to the nearest Carabinieri station, and the Air Force starts a technical investigation to find a correlation with human activity or natural phenomena; it publishes the completed investigations and yearly statistics, and classes an episode as a UFO sighting only if no technical or natural explanation is found. The Air Force says its purpose is to guarantee flight safety and national security, and the department's head in 2015, Brigadier General Massimo Berti, said that whether intelligent life exists in space is not for the Air Force to establish. The Centro Italiano Studi Ufologici, a civilian research group, notes that the Air Force's yearly totals are far lower than those collected by ufological associations and holds the Air Force's preliminary analyses inadequate or even useless because they take place outside a full investigation.

Mandate

After the 1978 wave of sightings the then Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, designated the Air Force as the institutional body to collect, verify and monitor reports; the Centro Italiano Studi Ufologici dates the tasking to 1979 and stresses that the Air Force was to collect cases, not study them. The department coordinates the evaluation of each report with the air-traffic, air-defence and meteorological services, using radar data to identify the phenomenon, and it treats every report as serious for security; according to Berti, few cases reach a definite conclusion linking the sighting to an aircraft or weather phenomenon, and the cases left unidentified have no common origin.

Records

The Air Force site gives yearly sighting statistics for 2001 onward and documents the earlier periods 1972–1990 and 1991–2000. The Centro Italiano Studi Ufologici counts the reports reaching the Air Force as zero in 2017, five in 2018, six in 2019 and two in 2020, and notes that only two of thirteen recent reports came from military witnesses and none from operational military personnel or pilots in flight. The civilian group has itself gathered more than 20,000 reports since 1946, with its main waves in 1950, 1954, 1973–74, 1978 and 2009, and holds that the vast majority are identifiable as conventional phenomena. The Italian site ufo.it counts 18,500 sightings since 1947, of which 90% are identifiable, with reports rising after the war and peaking in 1978 and 2005.

Open questions

References

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